Hi, I'm Virgilia

With all the tech campus proposals demonstrating how innovation is creeping its way into education, we wonder, can entrepreneurship be taught? While university programs that offer entrepreneurship programs would love you to think so, reality shows that isn’t necessarily the case.  

Entrepreneurship education must follow a pragmatic (theory + practice) approach in order for it to work. So how do you embed entrepreneurial thinking into the DNA of the naturally bureaucratic beasts that are universities? From my experience of working with an American university of approximately 70,000 full-time and part-time students, I’d suggest the following:

Think local. What may work in Silicon Valley may not apply to the rest of the world. Think about what industries are emerging locally and what expertise exists locally. For instance, in the case of New York City, according to the NYC Economic Development Corp., the booming target industries are:

1) Arts, Not-For-Profit & Higher Education
2) Bioscience
3) Clean Tech & Energy
4) Fashion
5) Financial Services
6) Industrial
7) Media & Emerging Tech

So how can local universities strategically align themselves with the city’s overall growth?

Mentorship. Universities should create networks of local experts that harness local industry expertise, and bring these industry/startup folk into the university so that students can learn from their ACTUAL experiences. This can be done through brownbags, workshops, demo nights, hack nights, any event that allows for offline collaboration. Mentoring occurs naturally when students and experts have the ability to meet in person.

Experience matters. Each department should act as a pipeline into entrepreneurship. For instance, health and nursing departments should partner with local small businesses within the healthcare space to give their students hands-on experience working with individuals who started healthcare companies. It’s a win-win situation for everyone. Students get the desired experience and connections, small business owners get matched with ambitious young people who they could potential hire or invest in after graduation, and universities get guaranteed retention and marketing opportunities.

Listen to the young. Universities many times forget to listen to their main audience–students! An unhappy student = unhappy alum = less alumni donations + poor branding. Hold “town-hall” like sessions with your already entrepreneurial-minded students and survey them to see what they a) like, b) don’t like and c) would like to see happen.

Feedback. Many times entreprenurial-minded students want to get some press, so universities should work closely with local media to make sure that their students are getting some media love.

Educate the old-school. Most faculty aren’t entrepreneurs–they are researchers. Before even allowing faculty who haven’t started or led their own businesses, it’s important to have internal sessions that allow all faculty who will be embedding entrepreneurship to have reccuring sessions with local entrepreneurs. Sort of like “Startup Weekend” sessions for Ph.Ds.

Faculty should educated on the new ways of doing businesses. I’ve encountered so many students who don’t understand the power of blogging and creating online brands for themselves during college. Simply understanding the new online tools that exist (i.e. Tumblr and Twitter) and then partnering this new knowledge with startup methodology (i.e. lean startup method, business models) faculty will have a more effective way of helping their students understand the various facets of entrepreneurship.

Treat new programs as startups. Don’t worry if a program doesn’t work out! If you fail, move on and learn from those mistakes. Test out an idea to see if it works, model someone else’s successes, and spread the concept throughout its entire ecosystem:

1) Idea
2) Validation
3) Test
4) Understand your audience
5) If you fail, fail fast and learn quickly
6) Move on or implement

Drop out or graduate. Entrepreneurship and graduation can occur together.  If universities are scared of people like Peter Thiel steering their students away from graduating, well then make it easy for them to start their businesses.

For instance, imagine a superstar electrical engineering major has successfully started a music company that is taking him out of the country for months at a time. He is however still interested in finishing his degree. The university should let him take courses online or even use the time devoted to the business as a Capstone project. There are obviously many other ways of going around the red tape, but universities have to be willing to be flexible.

Just like any relationship, what makes entrepreneurship and education work together is openness and collaboration. If universities and industry folk alike are willing to cooperate, then there is only room for innovation, and all the other great buzz words that follow.

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Year Founded

October 2009

The Team

Quixey has an engineering team, a business development team, and a marketing team. Their senior team includes:

• Tomer Kagan - Founder and CEO
• Liron Shapira - Founder and CTO
• Mark Sierra - CFO
• Nick Tarleton - Chief Architect
• Jacob Orrin - Director of Business Development
• Julia Lipton - Director of Marketing and Communications

How The Founding Team Met 

Liron Shapira and Tomer Kagan and were been friends since since high school. In 2009, Liron graduated from UC Berkeley and was working at Slide, and Tomer was selling off a previous startup called Your Logo Here, when they decided to start Quixey. For the first year, Quixey consisted of just Liron, Tomer, and various interns. Their first hire was Nick Tarleton, their Chief Architect. Nick dropped out of Carnegie Mellon to join Quixey. His last jobs were an internship at Facebook and a research fellowship at the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence.  Many Quixey employees are long-time acquaintances from BBYO, an international Jewish youth organization that Tomer and Liron were active in as teens.

Their One-Liner

 The Search Engine for Apps

One Thing They Are Looking For

We’re looking to hire a few top-notch engineers.

Contact 

We’re looking to hire a few top-notch engineers.

 

(Source: quixey.com)

Year Founded

Parent company, eJobbz, was founded in April 2008. YouTern as a product was first conceived in January 2010 and launched in September 2010.

The Team

Founding team includes Mark (CEO), Joe (VP of Marketing), Deb (Operations) and David (Director of User Experience).

How The Founding Team Met

They were fortunate enough to have worked together at a previous start-up in Silicon Valley.

Their One-Liner

YouTern connects college students and recent graduates to high-impact, mentor-based internships. Through experiential education, YouTern enables young professionals to gain the confidence and skills necessary to bridge the gap between the classroom and the real world – making them far more employable in a challenging job market.

One Thing They Are Looking For

They are working diligently to expand they products to take advantage of the brand YouTern has organically created in the last year. Once those products are offered for sale and significant revenue is generated, the last piece of their “proof of concept” puzzle is complete and they will seek investors to enable them scale according to plan while maintaining a market leader position.

If you’d like to show YouTern some love, Follow Them on Twitter and Like Them on Facebook. 

Founding Team From Left to Right: Joe, Deb, Mark, Dave (not pictured)

(Source: youtern.com)

Before committing myself to blogging weekly again, I wanted to figure out something that would be unique to the [clustered] blogosphere. Respected individuals within the Startup community are brilliant at voicing their opinions on new deals, partnerships, ventures, who sucks, and who rocks.

What [I feel] is lacking is emphasis on emerging startups with phenomenal teams. When you look for funding, the first thing they [Advisors, Angels, VCs] want to see is a cohesive and well-balanced team [mentally, emotionally, and skill wise]. Teams can make or break a good idea.

This is one rule that doesn’t just apply to the Tech world.

Therefore, starting this week I’m going to begin profiling one startup each week, who you should know about. Why? Because their team and leaders possess the ethic, endurance, motivation, and cohesiveness that all organizations should desire to achieve.